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Month: September 2017

Peter Valenzuela, MD, MBA is a physician leader, author and educator whose spent almost two decades helping organizations succeed in dynamic healthcare environment. His passions include change management, healthcare innovation, physician leadership development and instituting lean strategies to improve performance. His work has been featured in Group Practice Journal, Journal of Medical Practice Management, MGMA Connection and Physician Executive Journal.

The Medical Group Management Association and American College of Medical Practice Executives (MGMA-ACMPE) previously awarded him Physician Executive of the Year for exhibiting leadership deemed outstanding to achieve exceptional medical group performance in the delivery of healthcare.

In his spare time, he’s a medical satirist and creator of Doc-Related (www.doc-related.com). My webcomic follows the hilarious lives of physicians, staff and administrators working within a health system.

Why Healthcare? I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, I love to draw growing up and I love to make house, I thought I will be an architect. When I was 15, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Over the course of 2 years, I was exposed to different aspects of health care as well as its impact on families. It inspired me to change what initially I wanted to do from being an architect and going to medical field.

Hot Topic that should healthcare leaders agenda: Resilience and physician burnout and dealing with well-being.

Can you give an example of some of the things you’ve done to help with this? We put together a well-being committee that’s made up of physicians within our medical group. We created a plan on how we can help our culture as well as our doctors.

Setbacks that you learned from: Be careful on what you promise and how you have conversation because it can have a long term impacts on you and people who have given their trust.

Proudest leadership moments: We were a runner up in an American group association claim award – the highest level award to medical or healthcare group in US.

Exciting Project: We ask physicians about other passions they have related to care that they could do and let them do it so they can feel a sense of achievement and doing what they love.

Peter 101 Course on Outcomes Improvement:

1. What is the best way to improve healthcare outcomes?

Patient engagement. If we can engage these patients in better understanding their own conditions, that’s a major step towards driving positive outcomes.

2. What is the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?

Not including their families.

3. How do you stay relevant as an organization despite constant change?

You have to keep reading and exposing yourself to what are some of the best practices out there. Bring in speakers either in healthcare or outside of healthcare to help you see things in different way.

What I do to entertain myself and others is finding ways to joke about the challenges in healthcare and what our physicians are going through. I decided to make a comic: doc-related.com. I encourage the listeners to take a look and provide feedback.

Michael T. Rowan is an accomplished and visionary healthcare executive who leads multi-billion-dollar health care operations through significant change and growth, he has designed and implemented strategic plans that increase quality of care, capitalize on economies of scale, replicate best practices, and improved system profitability. He transforms the role of technology from a business support function to a strategic health management model promoting innovation and maximizing ROI. In addition, he:

-Identify business opportunities, integrate and refresh the entire organization, employee morale and the system’s public image.

-Champion integration of large health care systems to improve profitability.

Why Healthcare? I grew up in a healthcare family. My father was a practicing internal medicine position in Ohio and I had the opportunity as a child and teenager to work in his office and I really enjoyed the environment. I went to university and I discovered I wasn’t into being a healthcare provider but I like the environment. I was getting a degree in Bachelor in Business Administration and suddenly there are two things together, my skills in Bachelor in Business Administration and love for health care then I discovered there’s hospital administration, so I put those two things together.

Hot Topic that should healthcare leaders agenda: Population health. There are different ways to approach healthcare that lends itself better outcomes in the end. So much of health is determined by lifestyle.

What would you suggest something that companies/payers/providers should keep in mind if they really wanna move the dial on outcomes? I suggest employers that it’s important to engage people about their health. I worked with companies that started to encourage their employees to pay attention to their health. We got people got engaged in their own health and that is the key.

During the span of program, did you notice any difference in sickness or just outcomes that are worthy of note?

Absolutely. At Catholic health initiatives, we had about 130,000 employees and across those 130,000 employees in 4 year time period, we manage to generate about $175,000,000 in savings, a lot of that is healthcare cost avoidance. Our population of employees were less sick after we started the program than they were before. In generating the savings, we were able to reduce our annual health insurance increases from 8% a year before the program to about 2% after the program.

Proudest leadership moments: In healthcare, we turned our organization around to become very committed in understanding that we have to improve the quality of care. In business, we were able to engage our employees around the mission of the organization and help them understand what role they play in the organization.

Setbacks that you learned from: Making decisions about hiring new executives and manager into the organization.

Michael 101 Course on Outcomes Improvement:

1.What is the best way to improve healthcare outcomes?

Understand best practices and implement standards across an organization.

2. What is the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?

Allowing people honestly to deviate from those standards is easy to do in healthcare where we like to believe that sometimes medicine is an art vs. a science.

3. How do you stay relevant as an organization despite constant change?

It is important to constantly read and keep up with the field and to engage in continuing education which could simply participating and engaging in conversation with your peers across the industry and across the country.

4. One area of focus that should drive everything else is:

Understanding of the mission and how it relates to your customers of your organization.

Closing Thought: It is important as leaders for us to think about the concept of servant leadership. The idea that it’s not about us as individuals but it’s about the organization, to think about those below you to accomplish the mission of the organization.

Susana Oliva, CEO of Big Foot discusses the mindset companies must poses if they want to enter the healthcare markets in Latin America. In this interview, we take a non-traditional approach with Susana as our marketing guest giving advice to healthcare companies looking expand their businesses to improve healthcare outcomes in Latin America.

Closing thoughts: Healthcare is not the only industry in change, all industries are changing. We must be wary and thoughtful about how we collaborate with other industries.

Previously, he was the Product Director and part of the executive board at Cetrea (now Maquet, Getinge Group), where he worked with and directed marketing, innovation, design, and development. He co-founded Cetrea in 2006 and have ever since worked on product, sales, and business strategies, designing great products as well as overcoming all the challenges facing start-up companies and learning along the way. In 2014, Maquet, Getinge Group acquired Cetrea. The mission is still the same, but the company is now part of much bigger family with amazing solutions and a true global reach.

Why Healthcare? I never thought of working with healthcare, back in the university, I thought healthcare was boring, it was about sick people and I want to do something fun that working with unhealthy people. By coincidence, I worked with the hospitals and another opportunity came along and I spent 15 years working with healthcare.

Hot Topic that should healthcare leaders agenda: Healthcare moving out of the hospitals is going to be a big challenge for all healthcare providers and suppliers within 5 – 10 years. It’s driven by a number of different technology innovation. Everything is becoming software. Now the doctor’s expertise might be substituted by algorithms and A.I.

Is there any example that you can discuss how this has happened in a disruptive way? One of the examples is what you can see with ultrasound devices. You can see mobile apps where you can take out the patients from the clinic or other places. It’s not just moving the device into the mobile phone, it’s also changing the business model.

Is this the target area for your team and the people that you’re guiding at Kite? They are slowly moving there. It’s always about timing, there’s always a lot of hype around, I think it’s important to have a critical thinking.

How have you created results by doing things differently? One of the best examples is when we started our first company. When we started out our project, the idea was: can we use new technology to actually interact with computers in hospitals better suited to work in the hospitals?

Setbacks that you learned from: One of the hard lessons we learned is how difficult it is to go internationally. Coming in and selling healthcare to other country was really a hard challenge for us. Even though you have a good business case and good product, it can be really hard to sell the product.

What would you differently: It’s one of the challenges with no easy solutions. I think the most important part is in order to get your project on top of the list, you need to sit next to your customers all the time. You need to come to the hospital and make connections with the key decision makers and find ways to move your project on the priority list.

Proudest leadership moment: First, creating a healthcare solution and seeing it being used to improve the work. Second, we were selected as one of top 100 innovating companies around the world in all industries in 2011.

Exciting Projects: Preventing people from getting into hospital is a big case. Preventing people from getting sick. Another thing, using an entrepreneurial approach to healthcare companies and organizations tackle of new opportunities that come with innovation within technologies.

Thomas 101 Course on Outcomes Improvement:

1.What is the best way to improve healthcare outcomes?

It’s healthy living and it’s involving with patients. If you have a patient who understands the treatment they are getting or healthcare concept, I think it’s easier to get them to follow the procedure.

2. What is the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?

From a company perspective, if you stop evolving and lose momentum, you will never achieve the goal. It’s about making sure that you design momentum into your organization.

3. How do you stay relevant as an organization despite constant change?

If you try to disrupt yourself, it’s so easy to keep the direction you’re having.

4. One area of focus that should drive everything else is:

Make an impact within healthcare.

Closing Thought: Just keep innovating and making sure that you put the patient in the center.